“Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.”

To be thought rich is as good as to be rich.

One of the greatest of a great man’s qualities is success; ‘t is the result of all the others; ‘t is a latent power in him which compels the favor of the gods, and subjugates fortune.

It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute’s delay or advance.

I set it down as a maxim, that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social.

To be beautiful is enough! if a woman can do that well who should demand more from her? You don’t want a rose to sing.

Women are jealous of cigars, they regard them as a strong rival.

Then sing as Martin Luther sang, As Doctor Martin Luther sang, “Who loves not wine, woman and song, He is a fool his whole life long.”

Never marry with the expectation of changing a person.

A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess ’em.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

Benevolence and feeling ennoble the most trifling actions.

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.

The best of women are hypocrites.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

Those who forgets their friends to follow those of a higher status are truly snobs.

We can’t all be lions in this world. There must be some lambs, harmless, kindly, gregarious creatures for eating and shearing.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

All men die. You may say: ‘Is that encouraging?’ Surely yes, for when a man dies, his blunders, which are of the form, all die with him, but the things in him that are part of the life never die, although the form be broken.

Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man it can only separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed onwards, but there is no such thing as Death at all.

We usually say that you cannot become a legend before death. But I am a living legend.

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. And take yourself as seriously as death itself.